Design and drafting automation
A client who manufactures steam condensers found that the iterative
process of designing tube sheets was taking too long. Synergis created
a set of utilities to help layout, modify and count tubes in a tube
sheet design. The final outcome was that this client was able to
improve the efficiency of generating a satisfactory tube sheet design.
Several of our clients have come to us to create a set of menu/toolbar
picks for them to quickly achieve tasks they commonly do in AutoCAD.
Several times the projects have involved the creation of menu picks
from their previous tablet definitions.
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Product design and specification
A storm water treatment systems manufacturer had an issue with the
way their detail specification sheets were being completed by their
customers. The solution we proposed was a design utility that asks
the customer some basic questions, and produces the detail specification
drawing for the correct size storm water treatment system.
A flexible gas-piping manufacturer wanted to provide a utility
to its customers that would allow them to create riser diagrams
and properly size their gas piping system. Synergis developed a
utility that runs inside of AutoCAD and provides additional commands
to create pipe segments, connectors and appliances. In addition
to these creation utilities, there are also sizing commands and
drawing creation utilities, along with bill of materials and appliance
legends.
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Multiple application integration
With companies having multiple software systems within their organizations,
many progressive companies are evaluating the duplicate entry data
or the re-use of existing legacy data. One of our clients was installing
a document management system and realized that a significant number
of their drawings did not have attributed title blocks. They were
looking at the monstrous task of manually re-entering data into
the document management system that was already contained in the
drawings as AutoCAD text entities. We were able to develop a utility
to extract the text entity values to a delimited text file and import
it into their document management system, thus helping them integrate
the two systems better, much faster, and far more cost effectively.
A wire bonding equipment manufacturer produced software that converts
an AutoCAD drawing file to codes that their equipment is able to
process. They approached us about creating a utility to convert
the codes that their equipment processes to an AutoCAD drawing.
We developed a utility that is currently being used to help their
customers to determine errors that may have occurred with manual
changes to the machine codes. After the code is first converted
to an AutoCAD drawing the drawing is overlaid on the original drawing
to visually determine where the error occurred.
Another customer who manufactures self-storage units found that
they were getting numerous errors by manually counting the materials
that were needed for an individual self-storage building. We developed
a solution using Autodesk Architectural Desktop and Quattro Pro.
This solution incorporates Architectural Desktop entities and automatically
counts the materials required for a storage building.
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Quality control
A large electronic system integration company for major ship builder
creates numerous drawings through the use of a library of 3D Solid
AutoCAD blocks. This CAD library is continuously being added to
and modified, and they need to make sure that all the blocks maintain
a certain standard. Synergis developed a set of utilities that allows
the users to validate that the part meets the standards, attaches
standard attributes, and in addition, automatically prints the parts
for the printed part library catalog. An additional feature of the
utility includes a custom bill of material generation routine. All
of the utilities ensure that the drawings are created to a set of
standards and maintain a high quality, no matter who created the
drawing.
Another client contracted Synergis to ensure that all the final
released versions of their drawings were converted to a TIFF file
in the exact same manner, again, regardless of the user. Our goal
was to make it so simple for the user, that all they basically had
to do, was click a button and choose a drawing size. We created
a utility that provided this functionality for them through automating
the AutoCAD plotting process.
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Batch Processing
Quite often, customers have a requirement to process multiple drawing
files at the same time. Usually, the quantity of drawings is too
high for the process to be completed manually, therefore we have
developed automated batch processing solutions for them. One example
of this batch processing application was a utility we created that
took GP4 Image files and converted them into AutoCAD drawing files
and DWF files through the use of CAD Overlay. All this utility required
as input was the GP4 file directory and the output directory. As
the utility ran, a log file was generated, listing the success or
failure of the file conversions so that the utility operator could
verify the results quickly.
We have also produced a wizard-like utility that will rename all
the attribute tags in a group of drawings to a standard attribute
tag naming system. This utility is used quite often when the customer
is using a document management system that requires a consistent
set of attribute tag names.
Synergis has also assisted in the conversion of customers from
one CAD system to another. During this process there is always the
issue of converting the legacy drawing to the new file format. In
some cases we have been able to batch convert drawings to AutoCAD
DXF file format from their old system and run them through another
utility that converts the DXF files to AutoCAD DWG file format.
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Sales automation
Synergis has worked with a major HVAC manufacturer for more three
years on a project that allows their control systems sales engineers
to layout, propose, and estimate a control system for a client.
This application used Autodesk Actrix for a drag-and-drop interface
for creating proposal drawings. This allowed the sales engineers
to create proposal drawings efficiently and consistently. During
the creation of the drawings, the utility maintains a database of
the materials used in the drawing. Once the drawings are completed,
the user can simply run a report and answer a few questions to generate
a sales quote/estimate for the system that was designed in the drawings.
This system also includes various reports that are required for
the sales proposal process when they prepare to present to the clientPrior
to this new utility, this task was a time consuming and manual process
that required input from many people. Now, the sales engineer can
complete a proposal in a short period of time with minimal assistance
from another person.
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Facilities management
An architectural and interior design company who provides facility
management services to their clients approached us to help them
solve a problem they were having with some in-house developed software.
They wrote their own facilities management software based on FoxPro.
One of the problems was that they wrote a separate version of the
software for each of their clients, and consequently, the database
sizes were getting to the functional limits of FoxPro. This cusotmer
wanted to integrate the data entry with AutoCAD. Synergis designed
a solution that created one set of software that could be customized
for each client. Included in this design, we incorporated Microsoft
SQL server as the database engine to handle the large amounts of
data the new system would be handling. We also changed the product
so that the main data entry method for space inventory was through
the AutoCAD drawings. This project truly differentiates Synergis
as it was co-developed, along with our client, over the course of
a year and a half, teaming with two Synergis developers and three
of our customer's developers.
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To speak to our process automation experts, please call 800-836-5440.
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